It was as if he were an athlete: He was thirty years old, and it looked like his career was behind him. “There was only a foreboding sense of failure,” he recalled, “of my life emptying away and becoming an absolute blank.” He returned home in confusion and no small panic. What was he going to do? He had a pair of films lined up—The Delicate Delinquent and a solo project for Hal Wallis—but there was nothing else in front of him, not even a direction. “You ever see a guy scared to death?” he wondered to an interviewer a few years later when asked how he’d felt. “I mean, so it’s in his bones, they shiver under the skin? That’s how I felt.”
He had had his flirtations with psychiatry in the preceding year. Some colleagues recalled him talking about seeing an analyst, but he forever claimed that he had a single visit to Dr. Henry Luster, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. “I think it would be a mistake if you were to undergo analysis,” Jerry recalled Luster telling him. “Your pain might leave, but it’s also quite possible that you won’t have a reason to be funny anymore.” Nevertheless, whether he was under regular therapy or not, Jerry was certainly interested in the process: “I’m about ready to hang up my shingle,” he told a reporter soon after the breakup. “I know pain. I know when someone’s hurt.”
And he had developed a way to understand the pain he felt. “My doctor gave me a book to read that told about how if a puppy had only known one master and that master left him, the puppy would die because his heart would stop,” he revealed. “Don’t you believe that could happen to a human being too?”
Poor puppy: He sat around the house, moping, festering. Patti couldn’t stand it, but it wasn’t like it had been a few years before, when she left him. This time, she knew, the thing to do was to go away together—someplace he liked, someplace where he wouldn’t sulk.
Along with Jack and Emma Keller, they went to Las Vegas to unwind. “We went to shows, gambled a little, slept in the sun, everything,” recalled Keller. “The Super Jew even got to go and do some shopping. It was just dandy-wandy. Everything postponed. Everything cool.” Jerry actually began to calm down. Four days at the Sands restored him, prepared him to return home and speak with his managers and associates and figure out what to do next.
He was packing for home when the phone rang. It was Sid Luft, Judy Garland’s husband. Garland was in Vegas, playing the Frontier Hotel; Jerry and his party had been to see the show. Now Luft was telling Jerry that Garland had awakened that morning with a horribly sore throat. He wanted to know if Jerry would bail her out by performing in her stead. Jerry balked at first, but eventually he let Luft talk him into it. A baptism by fire. The last time he’d played a real single was at the 500 Club just before he begged Lou Perry to let Dean join him in Atlantic City. Now he would walk in front of a thousand or so people who had paid to see one of the great all-around performers of the era and … do what? It might have been tantamount to professional suicide: an impromptu single just thirteen days after dissolving the twosome that had been his public identity. He didn’t even have a tuxedo with him. Patti ironed his dark blue suit; he borrowed a pair of black socks from Keller—they were too small and scrunched his toes—and rode nervously over to the Frontier. Do or die.
Garland was waiting for him backstage, crying in her dressing room and assuring him that the crowd would be on his side. He wanted to believe it; he was afraid that there were people who blamed him for the split with Dean. He sucked it up and headed for the stage as the orchestra played “Over the Rainbow” and an all-male chorus line sang “Miss Judy Garland!” There was an audible gasp of surprise when he hit the lights. He walked tentatively to the mike with a shy grin and asked, “I don’t look much like Judy, do I?” The sound of laughter from the auditorium encouraged him, and he wound up doing almost an hour: pantomime to the orchestra, jokes, voices, physical bits, some singing. He wasn’t, of course, known as a singer, though he could put a song over in a showy, old-fashioned sort of way; nevertheless, for him to sing onstage and sing earnestly was to act as though he’d subsumed Dean’s contribution to the act. He’d dissolved Martin and Lewis into Lewis, and despite the hubris of the gesture, the audience was buying it. They liked him.
When he’d exhausted his repertoire, he turned to Garland, whom he’d asked to sit beside him during the performance so the crowd would believe that she couldn’t perform, and asked her how she closed the show. She told him that her usual finale was “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” It was too perfect: an old Jolson tune. It was as if his whole life, the decade with Dean included, had been leading him to that stage, that crowd, that song. He recalled all of his father’s throaty imitations of Jolson and dove into the number greedily, even dropping to one knee in a classic Jolson pose. The audience cheered wildly, and he left the stage reborn: He was a solo. He could do it all. Alone.
He had told the world that he broke up with Dean because he wanted to work, and when he got back to Los Angeles he tried to live up to his word. Paramount had agreed to let him produce The Delicate Delinquent, but he couldn’t get Frank Tashlin to direct it. As part of the fallout from the horror show of Hollywood or Bust, Tashlin had squirmed out of his contract with Hal Wallis. Too bad for Wallis: The final Martin and Lewis film, released half a year after the act’s demise, would be one of their more cinematically stylish efforts, if somewhat painful to watch.
The trade press was at sea in writing about the film, not really sure what to make of the spectacle of the sundered team still yukking it up on screen. The film was like the light from a star finally reaching the earth years after the star itself had imploded. “The boys are certainly quitting while they are way ahead,” wrote James Powers in The Hollywood Reporter, while Variety mused that “with all the wordage about the M&L divorce, it seems odd at this point in the interlocutory period to find them still a team.”
But in fact, though they spend almost the whole film on screen together, they are barely a team. Where they used to smile warmly and genuinely at one another in their early films, they pull their lips into tight little grimaces throughout this one. Where Dean had previously lost his patience with Jerry without ever quite losing the fraternal tone in his voice, in this film he lets ferocious, convincing bitterness come through. At a few points, he seems on the verge of physical violence, or at least ready to flick a cigarette at his partner.
Indeed, it’s hard to see through the conditions under which the film was made to the film itself. You notice that Jerry is even fleshier than he’d been the previous year; turning sideways to the camera during a bullfighting sequence, he reveals a small paunch and meaty fanny completely at odds with the prototype of Jerry the Animated Scarecrow. Dean has a tight-eyed glower on his face much of the time, and when he raises a hammer in mock anger at Jerry’s inability to fix a car, it seems possible that an atrocity is about to occur.
It isn’t nearly as vivacious a film as Artists and Models, and lord knows Tashlin had all he could handle just getting it shot without worrying about stylistic flourishes. In part, he’s hampered by the fact that his protagonists are on the road all the film long (an idiot’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty); as they decide who’s going to drive or wonder where they’ll get the money for gas, there’s very little opportunity for Tashlin to skewer his favorite American sacred cows.
The pervasive dreariness of Hollywood or Bust is summed up in a moment near the end, when Dean and Jerry, having lost all their money at Hollywood Park, wander through an empty Hollywood Bowl looking for a place to spend the night. They are shown at first from the last row of the cavernous amphitheater, a pair of insects walking through a seashell. Their voices echo amid the empty seats. They lay their heads on the conductor’s podium—one man on each side, not bunked down together as in so many of their earlier films—and drift off to sleep. Tashlin may not have known for certain (or, for that matter, cared) that the team was dissolving, but he found a perfect cinematic metaphor for the dissolution.
Now, though, Tashlin was over at Twentieth Century-Fox, directing the two films that would cement his reputation as a major comedy director: The Girl Can’t Help It, with Jayne Mansfield and Tom Ewell, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Mansfield and Tony Randall. (Though Ewell and Randall, both lanky and clean-cut, looked like Jerry, they were subtle comic presences, and Tashlin deployed them the same way he had Dean; it was Mansfield, in her unlikely physical contours, who served him as Jerry had—as a vehicle for cartoonish gags.)
Jerry himself had been instrumental in liberating Tashlin from Wallis’s reign. Tashlin despised the producer as early as Artists and Models, but he was locked into a multifilm deal with him and could see no way out of it save a drastic one: “I have to find a way to get the fuck out of it,” he told Jerry, “or I’ll kill him and then I’ll die.” Jerry suggested a simpler course of action: “You’re in the editing stage now, where you’re gonna hand the picture over to Wallis. The minute you see the first run-through of his cut, write him a letter and tell him you think he’s a fucking butcher, that he doesn’t know how to cut, that he doesn’t have the faintest idea about editing and has no sense of humor. And you’ll be out of your contract the day the letter is received.”
Tashlin didn’t believe it could be so simple, but it was. He bided his time and sent the inflammatory telegram. Wallis exploded. Tashlin was free.
But his departure from Paramount left Jerry without his preferred director for his first solo project. He turned to an unlikely corner for someone he could trust: Don McGuire, who’d written the screenplay for The Delicate Delinquent with Jerry, had just premiered his first film as a director—Johnny Concho, a Frank Sinatra Western. Jerry hired him. Rather than go with an experienced hand on his first film as a solo performer and a full-fledged producer, he felt more comfortable with a former yes-man, someone he could control without argument.
There was another bit of business to take care of before filming on The Delicate Delinquent began. Jerry couldn’t forget the rush he’d felt singing “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby” in Vegas. He approached Capitol Records, where he’d cut all those novelty songs a few years earlier, and asked if they’d be interested in recording him singing standards straight. They brushed him off. So he hired arranger-conductor Buddy Bregman, rented a recording studio, and went in and cut a few sides anyway. On August 21, 1956, he stepped into the same Capitol recording studio where he and Dean had cut “The Money Song” eight years earlier and recorded four songs—“Rock-a-Bye,” “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “Back in Your Own Backyard.” The first two were plain and simple Jolson tunes, and Jerry sang them in the barrel-toned tenor that he’d grown up hearing from Danny. He joked with his musicians and engineers—cutting up on the third take of “Rock-a-Bye,” he announced, “I’m laughin’, but I’m payin’ for the date!”—but he didn’t require more than a half-dozen stabs at any of the songs.
He took the completed demos to Capitol but was again rebuffed, so he began to shop them around. Decca Records was interested enough to ask him to flesh out the material into an entire LP worth of songs. In September, when The Delicate Delinquent was shooting, he cut eight more songs in a single day. There were more Jolson tunes—“Mammy” and “When the Red Red Robin”— and a couple of Judy Garland numbers—“Get Happy” and “Birth of the Blues.” There was also the pointedly chosen “By Myself,” an Arthur Schwartz-Howard Deitz composition written originally for Fred Astaire but adopted by Jerry as a signature number in the days after Dean; he sang it in The Delicate Delinquent, its lyrics transparently appropriate to his new life:
I’ll face the unknown,
I’ll build a world of my own …
Decca was delighted with the results, and within six weeks they had an album entitled Jerry Lewis Just Sings and a single of “Rock-a-Bye” out on the street.
The craziest thing happened: The record hit. Within three weeks, “Rock-a-Bye” was Number Ten on the Billboard charts; it stayed in the Top Forty for fifteen weeks, selling 1.4 million copies. The album, which sold a quarter-million copies, rose as high as Number Three on the LP charts and came to be known among industry wags as “Music to Get Even with Dean Martin By.” It was only partly a joke: Dean had never had a hit album in his career, and only two among his many singles—“That’s Amore” and “Memories Are Made of This”—had sold as many copies as “Rock-a-Bye.” Hearing Jerry on the radio, watching “Rock-a-Bye” climb up the charts where he hadn’t had a hit in over a year, he must have felt as though he’d been slipped some bad liquor.*
The Delicate Delinquent cost $487,000 and was shot on a skintight five-week schedule in black-and-white—Jerry’s first black-and-white film since The Caddy. Darren McGavin filled the role Dean had spurned, a Paramount starlet named Martha Hyer (who a decade later would marry a widowed Hal Wallis) played the female lead, and lots of young actors who specialized in juvenile delinquent types were on hand—Frank Gorshin, Richard Bakalyan, Joseph Corey. In some ways, it was like one of the Gar-Ron films: Jerry’s record producer Buddy Bregman did the music, his old Broadway pal Milton Frome had a part, Don McGuire himself played a bit role, and the script had a cop named Levitch working alongside McGavin in the precinct house. (Bandleader Dick Stabile, who had every reason to consider himself one of the gang, felt insulted by Bregman’s presence and sued Jerry for $92,500 for breach of oral contract to hire him for the picture; the suit was settled when Jerry—uncharacteristically—forgave Stabile the affront of the suit and agreed to use him on other projects.)
It was a good thing it took only five weeks to make the film, because Jerry seemed determined to do everything in show business at the same time. He did literally dozens of charity benefits that year—most for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, but several for the Motion Picture Permanent Charities, of which he’d been annual campaign chairman, and Cedar-Sinai Hospital, for which he’d raised three hundred thousand dollars in recent months and to whose board of directors he’d been named. He spent time planning the first of his programs for NBC, scheduled to air in January 1957. And he was getting ready for his most audacious move yet: In November 1956 he announced plans to play a four-week run at the RKO Palace on Broadway. He wouldn’t be happy just to make the world forget Dean Martin; he wanted it to forget Jolson, too.
Although he had a hit record, his activities hadn’t really been very public; he’d granted no interviews and made only the sole live appearance in Vegas. In November he emerged back into the limelight. He came to New York and sat in for Edward R. Murrow as host of “Person to Person.” In a single day he appeared on “What’s My Line” and “The Steve Allen Show.” And he began speaking to the press again, for the first time since he’d split from Dean.
For all his talk decades later about Martin and Lewis being “a love affair,” for all the nostalgic warmth with which he spoke about his old partner, the Jerry Lewis of 1956 sounded as nasty as a spurned lover. “I’ve never been happier in my life,” he declared to reporters at the Essex House in New York that November. “For the first time in ten years, I am rid of a cancer.”
There was more. He gave an extensive interview to Bill Davidson of Look, a full, autobiographical as-told-to cover story bearing the professional name “I’ve Always Been Scared.” It ran nine pages, with nearly a dozen photos. “All my life,” it began, “I’ve been afraid of being alone.” Jerry, with the advice and assistance of Jack Keller, had decided to present himself to the world in a new light. Gone was the madcap monkey, Dino’s little partner, the irrepressible imp. In his place was a thoughtful, insecure, ambitious, and humble man. He bared his soul, discussed his fears, his pains, his dreams.
And while he was being so honest about himself, he saw no reason not to be equally honest about Dean. He spoke about his former partner’s coolness (“he was never as warm and outgoing as I hoped he’d be”); he announced that Dean favored vulgar comedy (“Dean wanted wild, crazy noise without rhyme or reason”), he blamed Jeanne for disrupting the rapport he had with Dean (“Dean divorced Betty and married his second wife, Jeanne, and suddenly our families weren’t friendly anymore”), and he accused Dean of professional jealousy: “I’m sure he felt I was writing the material to build myself up. I’m sure I did things to irritate Dean, but in this matter, my hands are clean. As producer Hal Wallis and others know, I leaned over backwards to give Dean more to do at my own expense.”
The article wouldn’t appear until February, but it was hot stuff. Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky got an advance copy and asked Dean what he thought. Dean insisted that he’d been a gentleman throughout their split: “Jerry has been shooting his mouth off … but I decided not to say a word, not to answer him. I thought we broke up an act, a partnership, not a friendship. But this is different. Jerry talks about Jeanne and that’s going too far. … I don’t want to hurt Jerry. No one can hurt him more than he’s hurting himself.” Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. He got in a dig that cut deeper than he could have known: “The two worst things that happened to Jerry were taking a good picture with a Brownie and reading a book about Chaplin.”
This sort of thing made for wonderful gossip in Hollywood restaurants and in trashy magazines, but Dean looked to be on the losing end of it: Here was Jerry with a hit record and commitments all over the place for TV work, movies, and live dates. What was Dean doing? Next to nothing. He had no live dates lined up, he hadn’t begun to make plans to fulfill his obligations to NBC. Not even Paramount wanted to touch him. Joe Pasternak at MGM had been hot to work with Dean for more than a decade; Y. Frank Freeman decided to loan Dean out to him for a picture, an awful musical romance about a hotel manager in Italy entitled Ten Thousand Bedrooms.
As far as the public could tell, Dean seemed to be keeping busy mostly by lashing out at Jerry: “Jerry was jealous of Jeanne. … He was happy when Jeanne and I split up. … I respect other wives. I could talk about Patti and Jerry knows it, but I won’t.” He turned up—drunk, apparently—on a live TV broadcast and denigrated his former partner’s comedic ambitions. New York Post columnist Harriet Van Horne wrote, “I’m willing to bet that the first shattered atom split more sedately than Martin and Lewis.” Jerry, who liked to bind and frame all the press clippings about him that he could retrieve, began to collect material for a leather-bound book he labeled “Dean Shoots His Mouth Off.”
Always solicitous of writers, Jerry was able to make hay of Dean’s vengeful spree, revealing to reporters just how much of Martin and Lewis’s success was due to his own hard work and talent: “I’ve written, directed, and produced a great part of our shows. Why didn’t I get a credit? Why didn’t the picture say codirected by Jerry Lewis? Why didn’t a television show say written by Jerry Lewis? To begin with, this was my doing. I knew I never had a chance to get the credit because I knew about Dean’s subconscious resentment of the fact that I got most of the team’s publicity. How could I go on from this point? How could I possibly let people know that I also was the writer, the director, that I coordinated it, produced it, and was the businessman of the act? Well, how much can you overload on one side? So I never approached Dean about what in my heart had always hurt me.”
See? people said. Jerry was nice to Dean all along. He was the little guy, the creative one, the easily hurt one, the one who protected the other. Dean, who that spring bought out of York and cut the last financial links between them, took stock of his situation and realized how ugly he looked compared with his soulful ex-partner. He gave a conciliatory interview to TV Guide’s Dan Jenkins in hopes of ending the months of hostility. “I’m getting a little tired of being the heavy in this thing,” he said. “I get the reports. Jerry has stripped his house of every picture of me, all my records he used to have on the wall. Now isn’t that pretty silly? I’ve got pictures of him all over this house. My kids have got Jerry’s clown pictures in their rooms. Why shouldn’t they?”
But by then Dean—and even Martin and Lewis—seemed like old news. Back in December Jerry had debuted as a solo in a full-fledged revue at the Sands in Vegas, pulling in twenty-five thousand dollars a week for a three-week run. The act, Jerry said, cost seventy thousand dollars to assemble: Nick Castle did the choreography, Buddy Bregman conducted an orchestra featuring Lou Brown on piano, Georgine Darcy (the curvy “Miss Torso” from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window) was a comic foil, and a seven-man chorus line was billed as the Aristocrats. The opening night was overlong and shaky; the next night he cut the show in half, to just under an hour, and got much better notices right away.
“Jerry Lewis emerges as a major entertainer in his own right,” crowed Philip K. Scheuer of The Los Angeles Times upon seeing the revised show. Variety was slightly less enthusiastic—“Lewis, while good right now, is not sock”—no doubt because reviewer “Scho.” was incensed by the lewdness in the act: “He’s not only doing a panz, but doing it overly broad and too often. It goes beyond the laugh stage; it gets to the shock point.”
Jerry finished up in Vegas in time to return home for Christmas, then hit the Chez Paree in Chicago for two weeks and moved on to New York for ten days of rehearsal for his NBC solo spot. Sponsored by RCA and Oldsmobile, “The Jerry Lewis Show” aired on January 19, 1957, with guests Jan Murray, Woody Herman, and the Aristocrats. Jerry had chosen to do the show live from New York because he preferred the spontaneity and appreciative animation of eastern audiences to the blasé Hollywood crowds who, he said, had grown jaded from seeing too many movie stars on the streets and attending the tapings of several shows in a single day.
For the most part, it was a one-man show (“I’m a ham and I admit it,” Jerry told columnist Hal Humphrey). He sang and did some pantomime, and he performed in pathos-heavy vignettes he’d written with Harry Crane and Artie Phillips. Critics were underwhelmed. “Jose.” in Variety said, “He has the germ of an idea of what he wants to do in the solo comedy line, but at the moment seems without the means of articulating the character he wants to create.” “At no time was he as funny as in the old days,” wrote Ben Gross in the New York Daily News. And Jack O’Brian in the Journal American was downright nasty: “He needs Dean Martin badly. Very, very badly. … It was a program almost entirely empty of fresh material or techniques, even taste. … There was no speed, none of the reckless impertinence of early Dean-Jerry performances which counterbalanced the vulgarity. … There was no vitality, no evidence of what is called ‘class,’ too many slips into the lowest taste … a perfectly dull performance.”
Jerry heard these negative reviews. “A lot of those guys will lay lilies on my grave and make long speeches about what a great guy I was,” he told columnist Barry Gray. “I wish they had some consideration for the living and would give me a whiff of the flowers now.” But the ratings were acceptably gaudy, and he was too busy to stew over bad press. He did a week at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami and another week at the Sands, where he had recently signed a five-year agreement with Jack Entratter. Finally, he returned to New York to prepare for the Palace.
Jerry’s breakneck pace, his apparent thirst to show everyone he could stand on his own two feet without the crutch of a partner, was the subject of a great deal of talk on Broadway and in Hollywood. A friend spoke to TV Guide on the condition he remain anonymous: “Whether he knows it or not—and I think he knows it—Jerry has dedicated himself to become the great institutional American entertainer. The pattern is there—heading up charity drives, doing benefits at the drop of a hat and, consciously or unconsciously, pouring his heart into the old Al Jolson songs. It’s pure and simple ego drive.”
The anonymous friend was right: Jerry was doing it all to prove something to the world. He was free now to follow his ambitions: He was going to be the Ultimate Showman, the King of Entertainment. “For twenty years I wanted to play the Palace,” he told the press. “I asked Dean to play it with me. It didn’t mean so much to him and he said no.” People thought Dean Martin had helped him get to where he was? He would show them his old partner had done nothing but hold him back.
The past decade hadn’t been particularly kind to the Palace, thought it was still held to be the nation’s premier vaudeville theater. What talking movies and radio hadn’t wiped out, television decimated. Variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s and “The Colgate Comedy Hour” were bringing top- and bottom-of-the-bill vaudeville acts into American homes with a wider distribution than any of the old touring circuits ever offered—and for free. Still, the allure of vaudeville as the grandest of all show-biz formats—and the glamour of Broadway’s crown jewel—hadn’t entirely diminished. True, the Palace had turned into just another presentation house in recent years, hosting a combination of new movie releases and smallish live acts. But RKO president Sol A. Schwartz trumped up a “vaudeville revival” in 1956, luring big-name performers into his theater for exclusive multiweek presentations. He’d had Danny Kaye in for a successful engagement, and then Judy Garland did an astonishing fifteen record-breaking weeks; a grateful Schwartz renamed the dressing room after her. Jerry popped up in the audience late in Garland’s run, bringing the singer a cup of tea onstage and dueting with her on “Rock-a-Bye.” Now the theater would be his.
Broadway showhounds were predictably leery about Jerry’s chances: “If some of the TV reviewers made him mad, wait till he runs head-on into the drama critics,” a cynic at Lindy’s told Dorothy Kilgallen. The consensus was that Jerry was talented enough and certainly had the drive, but that he still hadn’t arrived at just the right formula for a solo act. Nevertheless, when advance tickets for the four weeks of ten shows a week went on sale, Jerry grossed an unprecedented ninety thousand dollars, with a top ticket price of six dollars.
The format was the same one Schwartz had used for Kaye and Garland: half variety acts, half headliner. The first part of the bill consisted of the Wiere Brothers (a knockabout comic trio), dancers Chiquita and Johnson, sketch comics Charlotte Arren and Johnny Broderick, the Seven Ashtons (a family of young comics from Australia), and a twenty-five-year-old singer named Eydie Gorme, whom Jerry had selected to close the opening set.
“I was doing ‘The Steve Allen Show,’” Gorme remembered. “I had a minor record deal at Coral Records, and I made a record called ‘Too Close for Comfort.’ And it came to my attention around that time that Jerry Lewis was in California running around to deejays and promoting my record. We had met Jerry, but we weren’t that friendly at the time. But he just went crazy over the way I sang and my record. And he asked me to come and be on the show at the Palace. And my agency and manager at the time said, ‘No, no, you’re not ready for anything like this. You’re just a kid, blah, blah, blah.’ And I wanted to do it very, very badly. And frankly speaking, my agency said, ‘If you do this, we won’t represent you any longer, because we don’t think you’re ready.’ I said, ‘Well, if I think I’m ready, and Jerry Lewis thinks I’m ready, then I’m ready.’”
On opening night, February 7, Jerry paced backstage with the jitters. He’d flown his barber in from California at the cost of five hundred dollars. His parents were in town, as was Patti, who was pregnant again. The audience was spiked with famous faces: Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Silvers, Nanette Fabray, Jack Carter, Lou Costello, Robert Merrill.
“Jerry was an enormous star at the time,” according to Gorme, “and of course, everyone was coming to see him fall on his rear end. As a result, the place was jammed. I was so nervous I was dead.”
The first half of the show went over well, Gorme especially. Then came an intermission, and then Jerry’s moment. He was introduced by the Aristocrats and walked onstage to an ovation. When the applause died off, he made a gesture toward the chorus line and announced, “I used to do a double but I cut it down to eight.” The audience liked the line, and Jerry launched into a ninety-minute act. He imitated Elvis Presley and Jolson. He did dialect comedy, including a Japanese routine with protruding rubber buckteeth and soda-bottle eyeglasses. He did a comic dance lesson routine. He conducted the band in herky-jerky fashion. He put on a wild fright wig and attacked a typewriter with his fingertips to a classical score. He sang (“Rock-a-Bye,” of course, and “By Myself,” and “Rolling Along”), he danced, he told jokes. He made his way out into the audience to lead a group sing (shades of a Catskills campfire) of “Shine on Harvest Moon,” even egging Joan Crawford into singing along. And when he saw a man in one of the stage-side balcony boxes not singing, he got a ladder and climbed up to coerce him as well.*
By the time it was over, his body and his repertoire were exhausted. The audience, which had been in the theater for nearly two and a half hours, shuffled out abuzz. He hadn’t fallen on his ass after all. It was clear to everyone that Jerry had shed Dean forever. He could apparently do anything he wanted to do. Although some of the bits he did that night would be mainstays of his act for the rest of his career, that night he was fresh, protean, and electric—an unqualified success.
Variety crowed loudest. Editor Abel Green himself reviewed the show and filled his notice with superlatives: “Ninety minutes of Jerry Lewis, with his great versatility, makes this Palace excursion very worthwhile. That Lewis had first-night jitters is incidental, because despite the somewhat uphill struggle, it cannot be denied that he has nothing but talent and is as potent a comic as there is to be found. … Vaudeville is not dead! … Uneven or not, there is no gainsaying Lewis’ boffola sum total. … This is a special type of prowess. … Like Sammy Davis, Jr.’s electrifying ‘discovery’ by theater customers … so too is Lewis a revelation in person … a one-man talent of great versatility.”
Other notices weren’t as wildly complimentary, but they were, in the main, much better than the reviews he’d gotten two weeks before on TV. Pointedly, the negative reviews concentrated more on Jerry’s material than his actual performance. People may have been drawn to the theater to see if Jerry would lay an egg, but once they’d seen him perform, they were won over by his sheer desire to please. As Lewis Funke wrote in The New York Times, “Not to be entirely with Mr. Lewis last night amounted to something not unlike heresy.”
The best notices, though, went to Gorme. “I had just made a record called ‘Guess Who I Saw Today’ that was also going very well,” she remembered, “and I did that and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.’ Well, to make a long story short, I was a smash. I was on in the first half of the show, and Jerry always said to me, ‘What did I do? What did I do? I came to Broadway to make a big splash for myself, and you took all the headlines!’ Of course, I certainly never intended to do that; it just worked out that way. With the exception of Variety—and I’ll never forgive them for that—the headlines in the other seven papers were ‘A Star Is Born,’ and it was me.”
The engagement was a resounding financial success. The Palace did $61,500 the first week and nearly $275,000 for the entire four-week run. Schwartz would have let Jerry play forever. On the last night of the gig, he came onstage to present Jerry with a silver plaque engraved with the façade of the theater. Steve Allen appeared with Jerry that night also, handing Jerry a gold record of “Rock-a-Bye,” which had sold more in his version than in Jolson’s.
Back in California the next week, he found himself living a bad dream. He had conquered the Palace, he had a hit record, he had produced a movie—and he was starring in The Sad Sack, a military comedy produced by Hal Wallis, directed by George Marshall and based on the comic strip by George Baker. It might as well have been At War with the Army II. He had tried to get out of it, sending signals to Wallis as early as September that he didn’t want to do another service picture, having his doctor impress upon the producer that he needed his rest, asking Herman Citron to find a way out of the picture for him. In November he told a reporter the movie “should be shot at the Menninger clinic.”
Wallis took all of these protests in stride; he’d heard it all before, and worse, and he knew that he would get his way. He was so confident that he even had start-up notices sent to both Jerry and Dean—they still owed him pictures as a team, and until a divine hand wrote words to the contrary on the hallowed gates of the Paramount lot, he expected to get them. As for Jerry’s antipathy toward service comedies, he’d not only included police academy scenes in The Delicate Delinquent similar to scenes from his service films with Dean, but there was reassuring news from Paul Nathan. Ed Beloin and Nate Monaster, the authors of the Sad Sack script, had lunched recently with Jerry, who had told them point-blank that he wouldn’t make another service picture. In pleading their case, the writers told Jerry that they were shaping their script along the lines of No Time for Sergeants, the popular Broadway Army comedy, to which Jerry responded, “I tried so hard to buy that and Lew Wasserman missed it by ten minutes!”
Jerry lost his battle and on March 18 began shooting the film. David Wayne had been cast in the role that Wallis had originally intended for Dean, Phyllis Kirk played the female lead (for which Eydie Gorme, without knowing it, had been considered on the strength of her Palace success). By the end of May, the picture was in the can and Wallis could go buy paintings.
On April 21 Jerry got a bizarre jolt of the sort that only celebrities can appreciate. According to the UPI report filed the next day, Jerry told police that a “wild-eyed stranger” had rung the doorbell of his home and shoved a piece of paper into his hand that said something about wanting to kill people. Patti and the boys were watching television in the next room. Jerry slammed the door, set off a silent burglar alarm, and ran to his desk for his .38 revolver. He spotted the intruder in the backyard and, dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans, chased him down and held him at gunpoint until the police arrived. The man was identified by police as a “frustrated musician” with “a yen for giving Hollywood stars the heebie jeebies.” He was booked on suspicion of burglary, and Jerry went inside to calm himself and his family.
He had behaved bravely; most people in his situation would have locked the doors, called the police, and cowered with their loved ones, waiting for help and giving the intruder a chance to escape. But as the years passed, he must have come to feel as though he hadn’t been brave enough. Retelling the story decades later, he rewrote it, making himself less a gutsy Everyman than a righteous James Bond. The intruder “was, unfortunately, a black man,” Jerry began. “I say unfortunately because today that’s what it always is. He was crawling into a window that had not been locked before we went to bed. And if it hadn’t been locked, then the alarm system shouldn’t have been secure. But the alarm system was secure, so why check windows? There was a defect.
“Patti says to me, ‘I hear something in the kitchen.’ Now, in the kitchen is an entry through a huge bay window. This man was exactly twelve feet from my children, because that was the children’s quarters. I had a .357 Magnum in my drawer, and I put a robe on—thought I’d look like a gentleman. I walked in with the .357 Magnum, and he’s straddling the window just getting his head under. I put the barrel of it on his forehead and I said, ‘If you know nothing about guns, my friend, let me tell you what will happen to your head if you make another move, moreover, if you even talk. Don’t even talk, or I’ll blow your fucking head all over this community.’
“I know now why I didn’t want him to talk. ’Cause I was handling it so well, I didn’t want to get rattled. The phone was no more than one-half a step from where I was standing. Called the police, they came and got him … they took him away. Whatever happened to him, God knows.”
The discrepancies between the account he gave the night of the incident and the version he concocted later were reminiscent of his boasting about his Mafia ties or the women who’d “burped” him or all the money he’d gambled away. He simply didn’t trust the realities of a remarkable situation to impress his audience, and in altering facts to fit his self-image, he turned his version of events into a hyperbolic joke: the bathrobe, the Dirty Harry dialogue.
Only when he spoke about how he felt after the police left did his retrospective account seem to coincide with the actual events of that long-ago night: “I fell apart. I was so cool that that’s why I said, ‘Don’t even talk.’ I didn’t want the sound of ‘Oh, mister, please don’t’ or any of that shit to throw me. I was like fuckin’ Terminator 4 until I put the gun back in the drawer. Then you could hear the house tremble.
“It’s an amazing thing—if somebody came near your house, and your wife and children were in jeopardy, you wouldn’t believe what would come over you. You wouldn’t believe, first of all, what your capabilities are. It’s frightening. I cocked that son of a bitch, and it would not have taken a microsecond to just blow his fucking head off. Knowing what I had in my hand, you don’t have to do it twice. Just one time. Bam! And the thought of that is what gets you crazy, that you are that confident to kill a human being.”
This frightened, uncertain man was far more plausible than the suave superhero he’d just described, but Jerry didn’t like to present himself in this light when it came to manly pursuits. The irony is that in altering the events to make himself seem more heroic, he wound up looking more helpless. At least when he confessed to fear or uncertainty, he seemed like a real person. When he put forth his revised version of his behavior, he seemed less like a he-man than like a caricature of one. It would have been a great comic role if he had played it in a movie instead of living it.
A second NBC special in June was Jerry’s last of the season. As a novelty—and yet another way of laying claim to a show-business heritage that transcended Martin and Lewis—he brought Danny and Gary on with him. Danny played the big star throughout rehearsals. He’d recently made his film debut as a nightclub owner in Short Cut to Hell, a remake of This Gun for Hire directed by James Cagney. Now he took credit for Jerry’s singing success. “His Jolson-type songs, you know, are what I used to do,” he told UPI. “When you hear us you can’t tell us apart.” He added, “I’m proud to be Jerry’s father, but when people introduce me as his father, well, I’d like them to know my name.” Gary, only eleven, was the only one who seemed unspoiled by show business. “I’m going to be just like my dad,” he exulted. “Dad has taught me how to get the right notes when I sing. We’re going to be dressed exactly alike in the show—tuxedos!”
Jerry orchestrated a cutesy routine around the Three Generations of Lewises: He sat on Danny’s knee while Danny sang “Sonny Boy,” then Gary got on his knee while he sang it. The show was more structured than the first—the guest stars included Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and Eydie Gorme (when, at the last minute, Jerry cut a big production number built around her, she remembered that “I almost killed him. I’m not kidding. I really almost killed him.”). But even with all of that, the critics didn’t buy it. “A pitiful reminder of Milton Berle’s early TV shows,” wrote Jack O’Brian in the Journal American, “except Uncle Miltie did them better.” “Even more embarrassing than the first one,” said the Herald Tribune’s John Crosby.
Although Dean hadn’t matched Jerry’s exposure on stage and television, he beat him to the punch in the movies. Unfortunately, he made his solo debut in the execrable Ten Thousand Bedrooms, and was lambasted: “Mr. Martin is a fellow with little humor and a modicum of charm,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times. Asked about his former partner’s career woes, Jerry said, “I wouldn’t clap my hands if I heard he was doing bad. But I don’t know whether I’ll see his picture.”
Jerry’s first solo outing, The Delicate Delinquent, fared considerably better when it opened in June after previewing for the trade in Palm Springs. Variety claimed the film was “neither fish nor fowl,” identifying it as “slapstick blended with pathos and some straight melodrama tossed in” and calling it “overlong” at a mere one hundred minutes. The Los Angeles Times was frankly puzzled by the film’s mixture of tones and genres: “The spectator may find himself confused, to say the least.” But Newsweek, which, like most major weekly and monthly outlets, had long ago stopped reviewing Martin and Lewis films regularly, called it “nicely mixed-up.”
It is, in fact, a transitional film, and its varied tones and dependence on a variety of genres only proves its intermediate status. It’s another schnook-makes-good story: A nebbishy apprentice janitor (Jerry) is mistaken for a young hoodlum by the cops, and a do-good patrolman (Darren McGavin) decides to take him under his wing and reform him. Jerry resists McGavin’s help at first, but pretty soon he wants not only to reform but to join the police force … and, incredibly, he makes it (though not, of course, without the usual complications).
Juvenile delinquency was a genuinely pressing social issue at the time, and McGuire’s touch with it is, figuratively and literally, extremely dark. Shot almost entirely in small apartments or offices and on darkened backlot streets, the film is frequently played as straight dialogue with no underscoring. Chief among these are moments when Jerry and McGavin talk about Jerry’s self-conception, conversations that Jerry called upon his relationship with his beloved grandmother Sarah Rothberg to help write: “What am I? That’s a very good question. But the answer ain’t very nice. I’ll tell you what I am. I’m a nowhere. And that’s the worst kind of somethin’ there is. … When I was a boy, I was jerky. And now, now I’m a man, and I’m empty.” With its dingy atmosphere, its jazz-tinged score, and its overemotional script full of elided final gs, the film is like a minor work of American neorealism, a forgotten cousin of On the Waterfront or Marty.
But of course, it’s a Jerry Lewis movie, so there are the usual capers. The film’s one unforgettable comic scene occurs when Jerry comes across a theremin owned by an eccentric scientist neighbor. The idea of such a gifted physical comic interacting with a musical device that is activated by the movement of human bodies in front of it is truly inspired, and Jerry’s approach to the thing—an evolution from wariness to confidence to abandon—is primally satisfying, like watching a chimpanzee figure out a mirror.
On the other hand, being a Jerry Lewis movie, it’s a little sloppy. Again, Jerry is unable to stay wholly in character: His voice shifts not in comic ways but in a way that reveals the actor behind the fictional character. Sidney Pythias is surprisingly capable of sober, considered thought, and when he indulges in it, his voices takes on a gravity and self-import utterly at odds with the rest of his behavior. Moreover, he’s wearing the inevitable wedding band and pinky ring, and he’s got a picture of Patti, Gary, and Ronnie Lewis in his basement flat—so he’s obviously not as much of a nobody as he appears.
But the strangest thing about it, really, was that it was neither a Martin and Lewis movie nor a buddy movie but—who would ever have believed it?—a Jerry Lewis movie. And the public loved it. Jerry had produced—and carried—a hit.
The cynics and savants had been right: Dean was in serious trouble, but Jerry’s talents and popularity knew no bounds. He went out to promote the film that summer, making personal appearances in twenty-six cities. He took the opportunity to make a tour of his past, as if touching all the spots he had played with Dean or as a struggling pantomimist would erase it. He played the 500 Club. He showed up at Brown’s Hotel and renamed the Martin and Lewis Playhouse; it would henceforth be the Jerry Lewis Playhouse. He went to Buffalo and visited the Palace Theater, where he’d debuted in front of that ugly burlesque crowd sixteen years earlier. He was fěted at Ebbets Field and given a silver-bound Jewish Bible by the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation.
In Toronto the unremitting workload finally broke him down. In a single day he managed to alienate the Canadian Broadcasting Company, a prominent radio talk host, and the city’s mayor. Along with his eighteen-member entourage, he kept the mayor waiting for twenty minutes to deliver a proclamation in his honor. At the CBC studios, he barged into a serious news interview program shouting, “Where’s the corpse?” At the Imperial Theater, where Delinquent was playing, he found fault with the stage and microphone arrangements. “Instead of controlling his temper, as a nice guy would,” reported CKEY radio announcer Stuart Kenney, who was at the theater, “he cursed the stagehands and unleashed oaths left and right.” Kenney was to have Jerry as a guest on the air later that day, but refused after witnessing his tantrum. A few days later, Dorothy Kilgallen reported that “those who know Jerry well say he’s been extremely tense lately.”
Patti was among them. As Jerry became more and more of a show-biz Superman outside of the house, she found him increasingly tyrannical with her. “The disruptive strain of his personality emerged at home, where he remained more director than husband and father,” she recalled. “I feared his temper and was not assertive enough to do battle. I just kept trying to hold everything together.”
In August complications from her pregnancy caused her doctor to confine her to bed. Jerry came home from his tour. She made it through the episode well enough for him to return back east in September and play the Town and Country nightclub in Brooklyn. On October 9, 1957, another son was born. “I don’t think Katherine is going to fit,” Jerry joked with the press when they asked the baby’s name. He’d wanted a girl again; instead, he’d gotten Christopher Joseph. Jerry bragged that he was “even with Crosby”—Bing Crosby had four boys—but he made no mention of his ex-partner’s seven kids.
He was back on NBC that fall with a newly negotiated contract: twenty-five shows over five years for $7.5 million. He had heard the negative reviews loud and clear, but the money and the ratings convinced him he shouldn’t do anything new or different. He was thin-skinned enough, however, to attack his critics. With the exception of the angry, rowdy interview he and Dean had given Art Buchwald that day in Paris, in which they’d insulted the entire British press with giddy insouciance, he had always kept quiet about critics. And why not? In the past, the critics may have jeered, but they’d almost always preferred him over Dean. The things they said about him as a solo on TV got his goat, however. He’d never been talked or written about this way since becoming a star, and he didn’t feel he had to take it.
Rather than attack the critics as people, Jerry explained that he had a bigger aim in mind with his work. “I’ve had my brains handed to me,” he reflected that autumn. “I got a going-over after my last television show—but the public wrote me two hundred thousand letters of thanks, an unprecedented thing. … I know I can do ingenious things that would get rave notices. But I’ve put them all away in favor of amusing the public.” He was a man of the people—hundreds of thousands of them. To hell with the critics.
He might have done well, actually, to heed the advice of at least some of them, if for no other reason than that some of the words he found so hurtful were remarkably insightful. Harriet Van Horne reviewed his first show of the new season in the World Telegram with some of the most apt analysis of Jerry that has ever seen print: “In his field of comedy, which happens to be both narrow and rutted, Mr. Lewis stands as a sort of witless genius. His jests aren’t even memorable, let alone quotable. He’s the only performer I know who can be both endearing and disgusting in the space of two minutes. You applaud the high artistry of his pantomime. But you flinch from the soulless vulgarity of his spastic twitches and low-class leers.”
Van Horne wrote with great appreciation of the best parts of Jerry’s act: his empathetic powers, his rubberiness, his ability to reveal—apparently—the content of his soul through the contortions of his body: “If Mr. Lewis practices the comedy of insult, he insults only himself. He is tortured and mocked, swindled and scorned. His occasional look of horror is a mute and terrible comment on the world around him. At such moments, he is not only endearing, he is fascinating.”
Van Horne enjoyed that night’s show; she especially preferred it to Jerry’s shows of the previous spring, which failed, she felt, because of his “anxiety to crash through the home screen as a personality.” On the new program, to the contrary, “we had Mr. Lewis the buffoon, the patsy. Much more lovable, this character, than Lewis the veteran showman, great and infallible and only thirty.”
Jerry read this stuff and liked it—for a few years, his official publicity biography quoted the phrase “witless genius” as though it were unmistakably a term of praise. He couldn’t have helped noticing, then, Van Horne’s lack of enthusiasm for his efforts to establish himself as an all-around entertainer. It wasn’t, after all, as though she was alone in her impression: “Jose.” of Variety, reviewing the same broadcast, spoke of his “sticking to his dream of being a one-man cavalcade of show-biz,” and also noted that Jerry stood panting at one point during the show and “should take it easier.”
Fat chance. By the time the NBC show aired, he was at work at Paramount again, on another Jerry Lewis Production, with Frank Tashlin directing and collaborating with him on the script. The film would take advantage of the publicity Jerry had gotten for his hit record and for the new babies in his family. It would be called Rock-a-Bye Baby and feature Jerry as a hapless small-town schnook whose lifetime love has gone off to become a famous actress. When her agent decides that the triplets she’s borne will hurt her career, she dumps them back home on Jerry and her sister, whose crush on Jerry is unrequited. Now a successful producer, Jerry cast both Danny and Gary in the film—the elder Lewis in a cameo as a furniture store owner, the younger as Jerry’s younger self, sharing a ballad with his father in a fantasy sequence.
Jerry was delighted with the chance to work with Tashlin one on one. During the shoot he managed to break Wallis’s will and renegotiate their deal for future Martin and Lewis films. (Reminded, prior to this development, of his obligation to do more pictures with Dean, Jerry responded to reporter Joe Hyams, “The only thing I have to do is die.”) Wallis had been owed three Martin and Lewis pictures when the pair split; now he would get three films from each man independently. Jerry had already delivered The Sad Sack; he would have to do two more pictures with Wallis, and the first one wouldn’t begin shooting for a year. With that in mind, Jerry and Tashlin began writing yet another script, one they could produce before Jerry reported to Wallis. So what if he did three pictures in a year: The public was still buying tickets, wasn’t it?
In the middle of the production of Rock-a-Bye Baby, Jerry took time off to go back to New York and do an MDA telethon, a nineteen-hour shot studded with guests: Milton Berle, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie, Jan Murray, Sarah Vaughn, Steve Allen—dozens of them. The show raised $702,000—better than the half-million that he and Dean had raised for MDA the year before, but a hundred thousand dollars less than Dean had managed to wring out of the public in support of the City of Hope a few months earlier. Many in the business had suspected that neither Dean nor Jerry would ever do another MDA event, so intimately linked was the charity organization with them as a pair. But Jerry had never stopped pitching for the MDA on his TV programs, he’d never stopped doing benefit performances for them across the country, and he’d never stopped inventing new ways to combine his passion for showmanship with his increasing devotion to charitable works.
There was Little Boy Blue, for instance. Jerry got a call at Paramount one day in 1957 from a nurse in Middleboro, Massachusetts, telling him about an eight-year-old dystrophic boy at the Lakeville State Sanitarium, where she worked. The boy was known in court and hospital records only as “Francis X” because his father was serving a prison term for murdering his mother six months earlier. His birthday was just a few days off, and the nurse wanted to know if Jerry could do anything to lift the dying boy’s spirits. Jerry got the inspiration to do a private show for him and beam it into the hospital in Middleboro. “I went to [NBC president] Bob Sarnoff,” Jerry remembered. “I said, ‘Bob, I’m gonna ask you for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar favor.’ I explained it to him. He said, ‘You want to go co-ax from Burbank to somewhere in Massachusetts?’ I said, ‘I wanna hear you say no to me.’ He said, ‘You are not someone that I think I can say no to.’”
With only a few days of planning, Jerry got a slew of entertainers to agree to appear with him: George Gobel, Eddie Fisher, Eddie Cantor, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Dinah Shore, cowboy actors Hugh O’Brien and James Arness, the Mousketeers, even Danny and Gary Lewis. Jerry opened the ninety-minute broadcast by singing “There’s No Francis Like Our Francis” to the astonished child. “The only people that saw the show were the few nurses and Little Boy Blue,” Jerry remembered. “And we put that fucker together in forty-eight hours. And there it was, in that one room, for an hour and a half. His own special.” Newspapers the next day carried a heartbreaking photo of a wheelchair-bound, bathrobed child wearing a Lone Ranger mask (to protect his anonymity) and cutting into a birthday cake.
The Little Boy Blue episode was the sort of grand, full-hearted gesture Jerry couldn’t resist, a moment in which a star descended from his celestial heights to touch the heart of a pathetically neglected child. Jerry identified strongly with sick children, whose condition seemed to remind him of his own childhood. At the time of the Little Boy Blue broadcast, he and Tashlin were writing a script evoking similar emotions. It was a strange combination of service comedy and show-biz story: Jerry would play a struggling magician on a tour of American military bases in Japan, in a sentimental plot cribbed from the classic Chaplin weepie The Kid.
The Geisha Boy, as it came to be known, is structured less in a point-counterpoint fashion, with each episode featuring Jerry and his plot line balanced by one focused on a contrasting plot line, than in a block-by-block fashion, with chunks of material utterly unrelated to the plot being dispersed throughout the story as comic relief. Its straightforward narrative borders on melodrama, but it incorporates material wholly independent of the narrative throughout: a Los Angeles Dodgers exhibition game in Tokyo, a montage of botched performances at military posts, subplots concerning the jealousy of a hulking Japanese first baseman and the vanity of an American movie actress. The formula allowed both star and director to indulge in his specialty. Jerry could break away from the story to sing, do impressions, cavort in block comedy scenes; Tashlin could stop the plot at any moment for a gag.
It became a working formula, the basis of the four films Jerry and Tashlin were to make together between 1958 and 1964 and the germ of the movies Jerry hoped to direct on his own. Tashlin, Jerry later claimed, let him “codirect” Rock-a-Bye Baby and The Geisha Boy. (The films do, in fact, bear more resemblance to Jerry’s self-directed films of the 1960s than to Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust, but it’s hard to say whether this is because Jerry Lewis produced them or because of some stylistic influence he exerted on Tashlin.) In fact, directing was the logical next step. He had already, in a sense, equaled Jolson, the greatest Jewish stage entertainer—the singing, the Palace, the charity work. But until he directed, the greatest screen comic, Chaplin, was on a plateau beyond his grasp.
By January 1958 Jerry had produced two films. The Delicate Delinquent was a global smash hit, on its way to earning nearly $6 million, and there was no reason Rock-a-Bye Baby shouldn’t equal its success. “Around the lot here they call me the hero producer,” he told Joe Hyams. “A businessman is a big operation here. You don’t put an idiot in charge of a million dollars.”
He validated his new status as a mogul with something more than just a new nickname. Big-time producers didn’t live in ranch-style houses in Pacific Palisades. Leaving behind the Gar-Ron Playhouse and the baseball field they’d built on the empty lot next door, he and Patti bought a mansion on St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. Sitting on two acres in the middle of one of the poshest neighborhoods in the country, it was a two-story brick colonial with thirty-plus rooms, a dozen bathrooms, three kitchens, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a huge garage, and servants’ quarters. It had been on the market for $450,000, but Jerry and Patti were able to get it for $350,000, in part because they knew the former owner, a man who’d died just the year before and whose widow was happy to sell the house to someone her husband had liked. His name: Louis B. Mayer. Jerry was sobered by stepping into the shoes of the onetime most powerful man in the business. “I think I’ve grown up,” he explained to Louella Parsons. “The home is going to be an inspiration to me.”
With the new house (to which he was adding projection and sound facilities and some other personal luxuries) not scheduled to be ready until May, he traveled. A musicians’ strike against the studios forced him and composer Walter Scharf to score Rock-a-Bye Baby in Mexico City. In April he returned to London to play the Palladium again, not as one-half of the show-biz equivalent of Roy Cohn and David Schine, but as a showman extraordinaire, an heir to the grand tradition of Sir Harry Lauder. The royal family was in attendance. Jerry remembered the reception he and Dean had been accorded and puttered backstage nervously. Just as he dressed to hit the stage, Jack Keller gave him a pep talk: “Go out there and do the best you can with the shit you got.” He played an hour and got the same sort of reaction he had at the Palace: The audiences loved it, and the critics admired his showmanship, if not his material or persona.
Making films that made money all over the world, playing before enthusiastic crowds at the great theaters of New York and London—it was no wonder he began to treat television with disdain. He fulfilled his obligation to NBC, but the network was increasingly unhappy with the results. The reviews were tolerant at best; more than film critics and far more than audiences, TV critics had wearied of his singing, his hogging of the spotlight, his seemingly bottomless desire to prove his versatility. Oldsmobile, his sole sponsor, was making noises about leaving. Jerry tried to spice the show by performing it live in Las Vegas and from an auditorium at UCLA, but NBC refused to pay the additional cost of transmitting the feeds for these broadcasts in color; he had to make up the difference himself. He could afford it—Paramount bought out his interest in York for an estimated $2 million that spring—but it gave the program the air of a vanity product, an indulgence like the Gar-Ron films but without the spirit of spontaneous group fun.
That summer, he toured the country in support of Rock-a-Bye Baby, playing concert dates in large outdoor theaters. He was one of the most in-demand live acts in the country, earning an average of forty thousand dollars a week for personal appearances. When he played at the Starlight Theater in Kansas City, he spent twenty-five hundred dollars of his own money to build a runway from the stage across the orchestra pit and into the audience—yet another touch of Jolie. He played the huge Greek Theater in Los Angeles for a week of sold-out shows. Even before a massive crowd sitting outdoors on a summer evening, he demanded complete attention—to a fault. On opening night, after he sang his traditional closer, “Dormi,” the stage darkened and members of the audience began to head for the exits. Jerry returned to the stage to take some extra bows and, he said later, to give credit to Lou Brown and the orchestra for their work. Seeing so many people on their way out, he shouted into the mike for everyone to get back in their seats. When he didn’t get full compliance, he got testy, swinging the microphone like a lariat. He claimed it was all in jest—some in the crowd had laughed—but Joe Schoenfeld of Variety wasn’t impressed with his explanation, chiding him for his sharp words and adding, “Surely Lewis is aware of the fact that audiences generally do not walk out on good shows.”
Gary Lewis turned thirteen that summer, a signal event in the life of any Jewish boy, as, indeed, it had been for Jerry. But where Jerry’s thirteenth birthday was marked by a painful bar mitzvah that his parents failed to attend, Gary’s was marked by a phantom bar mitzvah staged to convince Danny and Rae that their grandsons were practicing Judaism. In fact, Gary had been attending catechism classes and was confirmed in the Catholic church, as all of his brothers would eventually be. According to Gary’s younger brother Joseph, however, Dan and Rae would accept their grandson’s confirmation only if he was also bar mitzvahed. “Neither of my parents wanted this,” Joseph explained, “so dad, being the photographic whiz he is, shot photos of my brother dressed for bar mitzvah, in a yarmulke and holding a Torah, and showed them to his parents. They went to their graves thinking Gary had been bar mitzvahed.”
Jerry was capable of anything, it seemed, even creating events that didn’t happen. Not coincidentally, he increasingly thought of himself as more than just a comedian or stage performer or movie star. He had come to consider himself a spokesperson for the world of show business, granting portentous interviews about the state of the film industry. He spoke disparagingly about filmmakers whose movies tackled social issues. “Selfish stupid men who don’t know anything about entertainment and call themselves producers are ruining a great industry by not giving a damn about the public’s needs,” he told The New York Times from the set of The Geisha Boy. “They’re making movies just to impress themselves, so they can exchange messages telling each other how great and arty they are.”
At least as far as public pronouncements about his career were concerned, he was adopting an anti-intellectualism that validated his financial success while nullifying the barbs of critics. “I have often been asked to play a heavy dramatic role,” he told The Los Angeles Examiner. “It would be a change of pace, but I don’t feel any need to change. There are five thousand actors who could do a dramatic role better than I could, but not many have my knack for making people laugh.”
But rather than see himself as a humble showman of the people, he actually had come to see himself as a heavyweight player in the film business, not just a clown but a major producer and even a visionary. He spent part of the summer working on a treatise, “Observations of a New Motion Picture Producer by Jerry Lewis,” a dozen or so pages of his thoughts on the industry and what it could do to improve itself. In July he sent Hal Wallis a copy of it, which the producer filed away. It began in appropriately humble fashion, apologizing to “the producers whom I served as an actor, for some of the headaches and/or heartaches I gave them,” a reference that had to have rankled Wallis, the only producer aside from himself for whom Jerry had ever worked.
The bulk of the idiosyncratically composed tract consisted of Jerry’s prescriptions for the industry. Some of these were familiar middle-brow bromides, such as his call for happy endings; some were impracticable business proposals, such as cutting ticket prices or letting theater managers select the films they run; and some were just strange, such as his call for less frequent publicity for movie stars: “There has been too much exposure of stars in pedestrian atmosphere (as cooks in their own homes, in unflattering dungarees, etc.). The public needs idols around whom they build their own illusions.” (In 1951 he’d been photographed for Movie Stars Parade magazine sitting in his kitchen, poring over the Betty Crocker Cookbook with his maid, Carrie, and wearing dungarees, so he must have known what he was talking about.)
When he spoke about the public’s need for idols, he was, in a strange way, revealing his own needs. Ever building inside him was the need to prove himself—to the parents who ignored him, to the partner who deserted him, to the world that had jeered at him when he was a kid. Show business had always seemed to him to be the way to win unqualified approval from others. For a long time it had been enough to be a bigger hit than Danny. For the last eighteen months, it was crucial to be bigger than Martin and Lewis or Dean as a solo act. He had done all that and more. He was a movie star first, but the public loved him regardless of the format: They paid steep prices to see him perform live, they donated money to benefits and telethons he hosted, they bought his records. Only his NBC show, which he performed almost with his eyes closed, wasn’t a tremendous hit—at least not with the critics. He could legitimately claim to be the biggest star in the business. He was making money hand over fist, living in Louis B. Mayer’s house, commanding respect as a film producer, siring a new son each year. He was even starting to buy into a string of nightclubs and dinner theaters around the country so that he could be his own boss when he was on the road. He didn’t have to take crap from anyone. Anyone.
The TV critics got theirs. On KTLA in Los Angeles in October he called them all “caustic, rude, unkind, and sinister,” adding that “they’re burying the business they’re paid by.” He could see only the basest of motives for writing a negative review of a TV show: “If a reviewer writes a performer is a nice guy, he may be approached at the golf club the next day and told he’s a sissy.” Two nights later, his first NBC show of the season aired. He got hammered. Sid Bakal talked about the show’s “unprepared look” (it consisted, in fact, of bits lifted from his summer stage show and a takeoff on material in The Sad Sack). Jack O’Brian decried “Lewis’ apparent permanent addiction to bad taste.” John Crosby wrote, “Humility becomes him not at all and I frankly prefer Lewis when he’s calling us critics names. He seems more himself.”
That really was what it was all about: Film audiences saw a character completely distinct from the man; live audiences witnessed a protracted, exhausting, emotional outpouring of old-fashioned show business, and they had to cheer at the resolution and enthusiasm, if not the talent; but on TV, in their living rooms, people saw something else—the naked man, whom they didn’t necessarily prefer to the roles he played. Without the sheer magnetism with which he could put over his material in person, his routines looked wan and old. The coolness of the medium sapped his act of its appeal. People who couldn’t get enough of the insane character he played on screen, who found themselves genuinely moved by his onstage charisma and versatility, looked at their televisions and saw nothing but a man performing old songs, skits, and one-liners. Other comics did great on TV: Berle, Gleason, Sid Caesar. Playing themselves or a string of diverse characters, they turned the medium warm by acting as if they belonged in your house. Jerry, lacking on the one hand the time and budget to organize and compose that film afforded him, and on the other the ability to feed off the crowd’s attention and affection that he felt onstage, never adjusted to the medium. His efforts to burst through and hug the crowd, which worked for him so well when he was on a stage or enlarged on a movie screen, looking scattershot and desperate on a tiny TV set.
Oldsmobile was willing to back just one more show with him that season, and when Oldsmobile left, NBC couldn’t find a replacement. They pulled the plug. Five shows were canceled in all, giving Jerry some needed time off, his first professional come-uppance, and—because he had an ironclad pay-or-play contract with the network—five hundred thousand dollars.
His health was, in fact, shaky. On October 30, 1958, Patti had him rushed to the hospital when he woke up in the night convulsed in stomach pains. He was diagnosed with a perforated ulcer, and his doctors were concerned about his heart as well. They flew in Paul Dudley White, President Eisenhower’s Boston-based cardiologist, to take a look at him. White told him to slow down. The holes in his stomach and the flutters of his heart were the result of the stress he was placing on his body. He spent two weeks in the hospital; the diagnosis—overwork.
Dick Stabile offered a second opinion. He blamed it all on Dean. In July the two old partners had bumped into one another at a movie preview party at the Coconut Grove nightclub. In October Jerry had been performing on Eddie Fisher’s TV show when Dean, coaxed by Bing Crosby, surprised him on the air, bursting through the curtain as Jerry was about to break into a tune, and shouting, “Don’t sing! Just don’t sing!” But then he’d blasted Jerry in the papers again, complaining that Jerry was hogging too much credit for the creation of the Muscular Dystrophy Association and bragging that “I’m doing four times better financially than when I was with Jerry. I’m a much happier man since the break. I can do what I want. I have more time with my family. I love working for myself. If something goes good, I know it’s me; if something is bad, I don’t have to wonder who’s at fault.”
About most of this, Dean was right, but it was absurd for him to lay dibs on the MDA’s success. Martin and Lewis’s charity work had always been undertaken at Jerry’s instigation. One intimate of the team’s recalled just how unconcerned with the MDA Dean had been: “One time we were on the train going from New York to Los Angeles. They brought the Muscular Dystrophy posters in to take pictures on the stop there, and some children. Dean refused to let them take pictures of him. He took his golf club in his hand and walked about twenty-five yards away and started swinging the club while Jerry posed. That hurt Jerry. It hurt him very much. Dean did a lot of things like that.”
According to Stabile, even two years after their split, stuff like this broke Jerry’s heart. “‘I’m sick,’” Stabile recalled him saying. “‘I can’t work. This time if Dean wants a feud, he’ll go it alone. I pray to God I’ll never say a word against him, even in my defense.’” The bandleader knew the two men well: “There’s no other man alive who can hurt Jerry as Dean can, and of this I believe Dean is well aware. I was present when they broke up. Jerry cried for three solid hours. Dean? One tear in his left eye.”
Jerry may not have had the stomach for a feud before his hospital stay, but he found a way to one-up his old partner before long. In December Dean was set to appear on Eddie Fisher’s Christmas show. Part of his appearance fee was to be paid with the installation of a new electric kitchen in his house, a $7,500 model like the one Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had in their home. The deal was signed, but when the estimate for installing the kitchen came in $4,000 higher, Fisher’s people balked at the added expense. Dean then threatened to play Dinah Shore’s show instead, and when the Fisher office told him they’d pay him $20,000 to appear, he raised his price to $25,000. Two weeks before the show was to air, negotiations broke off and Dean’s appearance was scrubbed. At the last minute, however, Jerry stepped in and agreed to do the show—for free.
The press had a ball with it, especially when the business about the new kitchen was revealed. Dean felt insulted by Jerry and said so. “Jerry’s playing the grandstand martyr,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s not good for show business performers to work for nothing. But then Jerry never did anything good for the business anyhow. He just wanted to make me look bad.” He succeeded. Dean spent the holiday depicted as a show-biz Scrooge, Jerry as a munificent Tiny Tim. “I’m not mad at anyone,” he purred. “Remember, it takes two to make a feud. I’m not a party to any disagreements. I just went on to help Eddie. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.”
Hal Wallis got his two remaining films from Jerry in succession: Don’t Give Up the Ship and Visit to a Small Planet, both directed by Norman Taurog between October and July. That was that. Wallis had come to New York and found Jerry in a nightclub, had fought with Jerry when he wanted to appear on screen as something other than the character he had created for himself, had taught Jerry the business by examples both positive and negative, and now they were through with each other. Jerry had acted the grateful jester for a long time, and then the surrogate son, but he eventually evolved into a condescending, insubordinate saboteur. Still, he could never let go of a human connection easily if somewhere in his heart he once held it dear. When Visit, which was based on a Gore Vidal stage play, wrapped, Jerry presented Wallis with an engraved silver plaque to thank the producer for all he had done for him. He called a stop to the day’s work, according to Variety’s Army Archerd, to make a ceremony of it. After “telling Wallis how much he loved him, etc.,” Jerry handed over the gift. Once again, Jerry felt the pathos of the moment more than did his parting colleague. According to Archerd, “There were tears in Lewis’ eyes. None in Wallis’.”
Jerry had another disastrous outing on TV that spring—not on a show of his own, but on the Academy Awards broadcast. He had hosted Oscar shows in 1956 and 1957 without incident and to no small credit. His dignity had impressed people—yet another facet of a personality that they thought they’d known simply as Dean’s wacky partner—and his ability with an ad-lib stood him in good stead in a role often taken previously by Bob Hope. People in the industry welcomed his ability to comport himself with maturity and good taste.
But this year was different. At first there were no signs of trouble. Dean was there to present the Best Song award along with Sophia Loren. Indeed, he’d made a comeback of sorts, shocking the world with his actorly, career-saving performance in The Young Lions. (On location in France shooting the film with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, Dean broke up the cast and crew by embracing a toothless village-idiot sort who was watching the shoot with the greeting, “Jerry! How long you been in Paris?”) Jacques Tati, the brilliant French comic actor and director, took the Foreign Film prize for his film Mon oncle and castigated the Academy for its failure to recognize the contributions of the great American film comedians to the medium: “I am not the uncle but the nephew. I respect Hollywood.”
For the finale, screenwriter-producer Jerry Wald, who’d produced the broadcast, had all of the evening’s winners and presenters come out onto risers and sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with Mitzi Gaynor leading them. As the remarkable choir—including James Cagney, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, John Wayne, Irene Dunne, Janet Leigh, Cary Grant, Maurice Chevalier, and scores more—made it through the third chorus of the song, Jerry was signaled by Wald from the wings that there was still another twenty minutes to go in the scheduled broadcast. The show had gone off too well—with none of the usual delays or long-winded speeches.
Jerry had to improvise. “Another twenty times!” he shouted to the singers. Conductor Lionel Newman and his orchestra kept playing, and the singers continued. Several stars paired off and began dancing. When Dean waltzed by the podium where the winners’ statuettes were on display, he grabbed one for himself. Jerry ad-libbed, “And they said that Dean and I wouldn’t be on the same stage again!” “He needs me,” Dean shot back.
It got worse. The singers began to disperse. Audience members filed out of the Pantages Theater. Jerry returned to the podium. “We would like to sing three hundred choruses,” he announced. “We’re showing Three Stooges shorts to cheer up the losers. We’ll have a test pattern for the next hour and twenty minutes.” He grabbed a baton from Newman and began conducting: “We may get a bar mitzvah out of this!” Before long, he’d picked up a trumpet and started to play off-key. NBC finally broke in with some archive material—a sports film about competitive pistol shooting—and the messy thing was over.
Somebody had screwed up royally. A TV show celebrating the film industry, produced by the best creative talents of the entertainment capital of the world, had dissolved into a chaotic free-for-all. Years later, Jerry recalled that he had seen the whole thing coming and had warned Wald about it to no avail: “He didn’t believe me. I said, that afternoon, ‘I’ve got my musicians in here, let me rehearse a couple of things, I have a feeling you’re short.’ He said, ‘We’re long, not short.’ We were twenty-four minutes short. He was a fucking moron, anyhow. See, I try not to be negative about anybody, but when it’s an out-and-out moron and there’s no other word to take its place, you’ve got to say it.” By one other account, confusion developed between Jerry and director Alan Handley about whether winners should keep their acceptance speeches brief. Handley had made allowances for long speeches, but in his absence during that day’s rehearsal, Jerry told people to be quick, and as a result, the show ran short.
The press didn’t care about any of this retrospective finger-pointing. They’d all seen Jerry’s antics before, and now they saw him turning the finale of the Academy Awards into what looked like another ego-driven display of wackiness. They all assumed the mistake was his fault, and they all blamed him. Dorothy Kilgallen was particularly incensed, referring to him as “an egg-laying comedian” and deriding his “ghastly evening shirt” and “grisly accent.” In the future, Jerry would serve briefly on the Academy’s board of governors, and he would lobby with success to have the Academy present Stan Laurel with an honorary award for life achievement in 1960, but he would never appear on an Oscar night telecast again.
He may not have had sufficient glamour or high-brow cachet to be in the Academy clique, and it may have hurt him inside, but there were balms for that. In May 1958 producer Jerry Lewis complained to the Motion Picture Herald that the reckless bidding for the services of stars by the studios was drawing money out of the industry and preventing the development of new talent. In June actor Jerry Lewis signed a record-breaking contract with Paramount Pictures—$10 million for fourteen films over seven years, “the largest price ever paid for acting talent in movie history,” according to the studio. Only John Wayne and Marlon Brando among male stars commanded similar per-film fees, and they didn’t work as their own bosses. He would own half of the films outright, and the other half would be owned by a combined interest of Jerry Lewis Productions and Paramount, which would distribute them all.
The deal was seen around the industry as a signal from new production chief Jack Karp that Paramount, which had lost many stars to studios with more willingness to open their wallets, would be more aggressive in signing talent (an industry joke had held that a dead man—the late Cecil B. DeMille, whose movies were still making money—was the studio’s hottest talent). To those who expressed astonishment at Paramount’s willingness to spend so much for Jerry Lewis’s services, the studio had a simple answer: The first twenty-one films in which he appeared had grossed more than $400 million worldwide.
Paramount wasn’t signing a crazy comic with a dark side; they weren’t signing a mere pretender to the thrones of Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin; they were signing a franchise.